The Life of Saul Bellow, Volume 2 Love and Strife, 1965-2005

The second volume in the life of literary giant Saul Bellow, vividly capturing a personal life that was always tumultuous and career that never ceased being triumphant.

Bellow, at forty-nine, is at the pinnacle of American letters--rich, famous, critically acclaimed. The expected trajectory is one of decline: volume 1, rise; volume 2, fall. Bellow never fell, producing in the latter half of his life some of his greatest fiction (Mr. Sammler's Planet, Humboldt's Gift), winning two more National Book Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel Prize. At eighty, he wrote his last story; at eighty-five, he wrote Ravelstein. In this volume, his life away from the desk, including his love life, is if anything more dramatic than in the first. In the public sphere, he is embroiled in controversy over foreign affairs, race, religion, education, social policy, the state of culture, the fate of the novel.

In this stunning second volume, Zachary Leader shows that Bellow's heroic energy and will were present to the very end of his life. His immense achievement and its cost, to himself and others, continue to be worth the examination of this vivid work of literary scholarship.

ZACHARY LEADER is professor of English literature at the Uni­versity of Roehampton in London. Although born and raised in the United States, he has lived in Britain for more than forty years and has dual British and American citizenship. In addi­tion to teaching at Roehampton, he has held visiting profes­sorships at Caltech and the University of Chicago. He was educated at Northwestern University; Trinity College, Cam­bridge; and Harvard University; and is the author of Reading Blake's Songs; Writer's Block; Revision and Romantic Authorship; The Life of Kingsley Amis, a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Biography; and The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune 1915-1964. He has edited Romantic Period Writings, 1798-1832: An Anthology (with Ian Haywood); The Letters of Kingsley Amis; On Modern British Fiction; Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works (with Michael O'Neill); The Movement Reconsidered: Essays on Larkin, Amis, Gunn, Davie, and Their Contemporaries; and On Life-Writing. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and General Editor of The Oxford History of Life-Writing, a seven-volume series.